smallbigbrand:

There is no value in a brand name or a logo. There is value in what customers associate that name or logo with, value in who you really are as a brand. If your customers think you’re something, congratulations. Now find a way to strengthen that perception (unless they think you’re crap of course).

Yet time and time again, you see brands who are something but want to be something else. Usually they want to be something their strongest competitor is. Let’s look at two examples:

1) Volvo
Ask people ten years ago about Volvo and they’ll say it’s safe, high-quality and maybe a bit boring. And people didn’t just think Volvos were safe, they thought it was THE safest car on the planet. So what did Volvo want? They wanted to be sporty.

It’s easy to see why, with BMW being so successful. But here’s the thing; when BMW is already “the ultimate driving experience”, you cannot beat them at their own game. You can never be sportier than BMW, unless they really mess up. They own that position, they understand it, they have the products, the people, the structure and the passion to be in that position. Volvo doesn’t.

Volvo can change the design of their cars, put in bigger engines, hire some people away from BMW, but chances that BMW will relinquish their extremely profitable brand position and that you can take it over are slim to none. Even if you can build a sportier car (which you likely can’t), that doesn’t mean the consumer will realize it. Many experts say Nissan’s GTR is a better car than a Porsche 911, but which sports car would you rather own?

Of course, in beefing up their engines, creating hipper designs and changing the focus of their communication, Volvo has gotten a bit sportier in the past ten years. But have they overtaken BMW in that department? Not even close. At the same time, they have lost that iconic safety position, they are still very safe but do we assume they are in a league of their own? Nope.

Instead of trying to be BMW, they should have focussed on being more Volvo. Really pour on the safety aspects. Push the idea that being sporty is nice, but if you have a choice to go from 0-100 in 6 seconds or keeping your family safe, what would you choose? Maybe it’s boring, but in the end plenty of people will drool over sporty and buy safety, if the case is made well.

2) Blackberry
Blackberry got big by being a product for business people. Then they decided they wanted to be a consumer product. The irony was that they already were a consumer brand with their business phones, for some because the features of business phones appeal to them as consumers, for others because it was cool simply not to have a mainstream consumer product.

Of course, their attempt to aggressively target the consumer market, instead of viewing it as a side-catch of their business approach, has backfired spectacularly (with the horribly named PlayBook tablet at the center). By all accounts, it’s a very nice tablet, and it’s likely used for play a lot, but who wants to admit that? Especially because it needed to connect to a Blackberry phone to work, it would have made a lot more sense to position it as a BizBook, as an indispensable extension of your Blackberry for work.

Thanks to the Playbook and many other decisions (don’t get me started on those TV commercials about the music exec), consumers don’t think Blackberry is different and cool anymore, and many business customers no longer see it as the ultimate business phone. They’re getting iPhones in droves, which is ironic as Apple has always maintained they will not make compromises to the iPhone to make it more appealing to business. Turns out they didn’t have to, they had a genuine product, with strengths and weaknesses, but its coolness covered up those weaknesses sufficiently for business customers to make the switch.

The lesson is always the same: Embrace who you are and work to strengthen that position, because it’s very hard to change (both for you and your customers).

BTW, my modest opinion on what Blackberry should do now can be found in my next blog, so subscribe at the top left of this page to receive it automatically.

After 15 years of starting, building and running Cervelo with Phil White, the most important conclusion I drew was: I like simplicity.

I would rather produce one product and sell 1000 units of it than having 1000 products of which I sell one each. Sounds logical, but I was always amazed how some companies we competed with had enormous model lines despite being smaller than us, trying to be “everything to everybody” and ending up being “nothin’ to nobody”.

After a while, as the company grew, it became harder and harder to keep things simple and I think we didn’t do a stellar job of it in the end. To be fair, it was also never an explicit principle inside the company.

Keeping your model line simple has a cascading effect:

• It keeps your communication clean, making it easy for your customers to understand what you offer.
• It makes it easy to keep information up-to-date, your brochures, websites, ads, etc.
• It means you need to train staff and resellers on fewer models, so the chances they actually know what they’re talking about when they interact with your customers increase.
• Your logistics become easier.
• You have less risk of obsolete inventory, close-outs and discounts.

I strongly believe it’s one of the reasons for Apple’s success; here is one of the world’s biggest companies yet all their products fit on one page. One version of the iPad outsells three versions of the Samsung Tab 4:1. One iPhone outsells the dozens of smartphones from Nokia and Blackberry combined. This is not only because it’s easier for the customer to figure out what product they need when choice is limited, it’s also because the company can focus better. If you have fewer products to update on your website, you can make sure it’s up-to-date and tweak it whenever you need.

Of course if you only have one model and it’s shit, it won’t work. And some complexity is always needed, after all the simplest business has zero products/services, zero suppliers, zero customers and zero revenue.

The simplicity doesn’t apply just to the model line, I think it is almost always best to go with the simplest solution. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t as good as we like to think, so keeping it simple reduces the risk of screwing things up.

So how about Amazon, that’s a very complex business? I’m sure it is, although probably as simple as it can be while doing what it does. But regardless, the fact of the matter is that very few people can run a company as complex as Amazon, and you and I are likely not somebody who can (unless that’s you reading, Jeff Bezos). So for mere mortals to have a chance at running a successful company, keep it simple.

There is another advantage to setting a business principle like “relentless simplicity” in stone – It makes it much easier to take decisions. If you can measure your options against the simplicity principle, it’s often very clear what the best course of action is.

See our relentless simplicity in practice (eventually) here.

Even if you know it all, sometimes it’s nice to get some outside perspective. Problem is, traditional market research is expensive and often you’re not looking for peer-reviewed double-blinded answers, you just need some direction.

If you have any sort of following on Twitter, Facebook or have your own email database (with the right permissions), the online poll is your best friend. You don’t actually need that many followers to do this, you can easily get a 10% response rate with just a few reminders and some friendly begging. And if you get 50 or 100 answers, you may not be able to publish your results in Science magazine, but it will be good enough to confirm or deny your own instincts.

Some may interject that the results will be heavily skewed by the fact that your followers are not an accurate representation of the world out there. True, but while your followers are (heavily) biased by knowing you, that makes them also biased towards potentially wanting to buy this new product or service that you need some input on, so their feedback may actually be MORE helpful. I don’t need to know if the average person on this planet prefers blue or red, I need to know if the people most likely to be interested in what I’m doing like blue or red.

Of course you have to be careful. Don’t ask a question like “would you buy this widget” and then extrapolate the 50% that reply yes into the conclusion you can sell 3 billion worldwide. Also, the usefulness of a poll is directly related to the quality of the question and answers (in case of multiple-choice) provided, so really spend some time on that and test it on a few people to make sure it’s not confusing in any way. In particular:

• Will people be embarrassed to answer your question truthfully? If so, consider trying a question where you don’t ask their opinion but instead what they think other people’s opinion would be.
• Is it important to weed out some of your followers whose opinion on this particular question you do NOT value? For example, if you have a male grooming question, the answer from the women following you may not matter (or may). So add an answer as an “easy out” for those people, something like “hey, if I ever need this product, I’ve got bigger issues than answering online polls).

Depending on how many questions you have and if you want to spend nothing or merely very little, there are a ton of options available to you. Just google “free online poll” or “cheap online survey” to find them.

I’ve used easypolls.net, mostly because it’s easy and free, but also because they (as well as some others) have a very nice paid feature: geo-tracking. This allows you to not only roughly see where the respondents live, but also what their individual answers were. So if everybody in the US answers red and everybody in Germany prefers blue, you’ll know.

That’s good to know in some cases, as it may lead you to the conclusion that you need separate versions for separate regions (Avoid that complication if you can of course, but sometimes you can’t). Now when I say “paid”, do not worry. The charge is 99 cents!

To read about a poll I did for open cycle, go here.